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Saturday, 21 December 2013

the three little men in the forest

There was once a series of posts about the Grimms’ fairy tales, which fell asleep for a hundred years. A thicket of thorns grew up around it, and those few who remembered it at all supposed that it had succumbed to the writer’s usual inability to persevere with anything. Then suddenly, one cold winter’s day, the darkest of the year, a new post appeared, like a lovely rose blossoming. Hem.

All was not quite as it had been, however. The writer had belatedly noticed that all the fairy tales had already been posted on the internets, and so she decided that rather than hammer out her turgid retellings she would direct readers to a proper translation of the Grimms’ version, where they could enjoy the stories in their proper forms.

So, ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’ can be read here, if you don’t have a copy or know it already.

(Arthur Rackham, ‘What did she find there but real ripe strawberries’, illustration for Little Brother and Little Sister and Other Tales by the Brothers Grimm, London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1917; found here)

It’s a cheerful welding together of two sorts of story, but one that I have found curious. The first is called ‘the kind and unkind girls’ trope, and in it a good, kind girl is sent to do a menial, unpleasant or even dangerous task, meets a magical being to whom she is courteous and obliging, and receives a wonderful reward; her bad stepsister is then sent on the same errand, but because she is rude and horrible what she receives is suitably unpleasant and punitive. A famous example of this trope is in ‘Mother Holle’.

In ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’, the wicked stepmother orders the good girl to wear a paper dress and go out into the snow to gather strawberries; far from perishing in the cold, she finds a cottage, shares her one piece of bread with the three little ‘elf-men’ who inhabit it, and clears the snow from their path good-humouredly. Consequently, she is bestowed with the gifts of growing more beautiful every day, having gold coins fall from her mouth when she speaks and marrying a king. The bad stepsister, on the other hand, is sent out in furs and with ‘buttered bread and cake’ to eat, but is so selfish and rude that the three little men punish her with the mirror of the good girl’s rewards: she will grow uglier each day, toads will leap from her mouth whenever she speaks and she will die a miserable death.

This trope functions in several ways: by splitting the young girl character into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ it can act as a rather clumsy reinforcement of ‘approved’ female qualities – obedience, kindness, generosity, diligence – contrasted with the terrible fate which might befall a lazy, saucy, bad-tempered wench. In particular, it highlights the virtue of obedience, which I would argue is the good girl’s main characteristic in the story: she is obedient to father, stepmother, little men and husband, in turn. The good sister’s virtues are rewarded with those features which make a girl most attractive in the marriage market: physical beauty (here reflecting inner beauty) and wealth – and with those gold coins falling from her lips, who will listen to what she actually says?

The girl character ‘splits’ again during the second trope, that of ‘the false bride’, which we saw in ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’. Interpreted like this, the girl’s identity is particularly unstable in this tale. Again, the revenant bride is rescued just in time, and in the first edition of the tales, so Joyce Crick tells us in the Oxford University Press edition, the wicked stepmother and stepsister were also left in the forest to be eaten by wild animals. The barrel of nails was added later, and Wilhelm Grimm justified it as having been described in a thirteenth-century chronicle from the Netherlands. The wicked stepmother inadvertently chooses it as her and her daughter’s punishment in reply to the king’s trick question at the end of the story. Why did Wilhelm change it? To distinguish it slightly from ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’?

It is of course the details which define this story and elevate it above a simple ‘type’: the paper dress, the strawberries in the snow, swilling the yarn in the icy river. It’s always winter before the king finds the good girl and marries her. The forest is the place of magic and testing, as in so many of the Grimms’ tales; for the good girl it is a refuge, benign; for the wicked, it is threatening, where beasts may devour them. But I think my favourite part is right at the beginning (from the OUP edition):

There was once a man whose wife had died, and there was a woman whose husband had died. Now the man had a daughter, and so did the woman. The girls knew each other, and one day they went for a walk together and afterwards went to the woman’s house. Then the woman said to the man’s daughter: ‘Listen, tell your father I would like to marry him, and when I do you shall wash yourself every morning in milk, and have wine to drink, but my own daughter shall have water to wash in and water to drink.’ The girl went home and told her father what the woman had said. The man said: ‘What shall I do? Marriage is a pleasure, but it’s also a torment.’ At last, because he couldn’t come to a decision, he took off his boot and said: ‘Take it up to the attic, hang it on the big nail there, and pour water into it. If it holds the water, I’ll take a wife again, but if the water runs out, I won’t.’ The girl did as she was told; but the water shrank the hole, and the boot was full to the brim. She told her father what had happened. Then he went upstairs himself, and when he saw that it was so he went to the widow and wooed her, and the wedding took place.

Irresponsible fathers are a feature of the Grimms’ tales, but this one is intriguing. He takes the widow’s promises of kindness to his daughter on trust, but not his own child’s observation of the boot: this he corroborates himself. He uses a boot with a hole in it – did he know this, and so really had decided not to marry? Or was he unaware of it, assuming the boot would probably hold the water, and thus quite keen on the widow? In either case, what did he hope to prove with the boot? Or again, was he, in a story where most of the characters lack any great cunning, incredibly stupid? And why in the attic, does he associate that with the head, the brain?

I’m not sure I’ve written all I want to write about this, or finished thinking about it. But life is short, so I’ll post it anyway. What do you make of it?

Next time: ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

(Black-and-white illustration by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; found here)

Comments

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Perhaps the boot with the hole that doesn't leak represents the sort of miraculous luck one needs to marry well? (Tho it doesn't work, of course - in that sense a bit like testing witches by 'drowning'.) This is such an odd story, isn't it? - among very many other aspects, the motif of the paper dress intrigues me (I wonder why it isn't rags? - keeping up appearances?!). I hadn't read this one before, so thanks for introducing it - and Merry Christmas!

I like that idea about the boot very much, vicki! The paper dress is odd, would a fairly humble family like that have had so much paper to hand? Perhaps the good girl was an avid reader and her stepmother punished her by sewing her books into a dress...

Merry Christmas to you too, ay it be filled with fantastic books. It's been lovely meeting you (this year, I think?) and discovering your web-log.

It's interesting that at the start of the story the girls know each other and seem to possibly be friends (going for a walk together and all) and then they split so suddenly into these strong archetypes- I feel a bit sad for their friendship there. And did the girl want milk to wash in and water to drink, or was she just being obedient in repeating the story to her father? The story seems to start so ambiguously and end quite unambiguously.

What good observations, Catie! They made me wonder about female friendship in the Grimms' tales: I haven't found much so far. I mean friendships between ordinary girls or women. There are the sisters Snow White and Rose Red, and the Twelve Dancing Princesses. Can you think of any more?

Merry Christmas to you too, Catie, it's so nice to have met you! And yes, hooray for fairy tales!

How lovely to have you writing about fairy tales again - but never fear. I don't know how anyone with a full time job and a young family manages to blog at all, let alone with the intelligence and thoughtfulness that you do! For some reason this story makes me think about an article I read online today that wondered where all the strong female leads have gone on television, asking: 'Where are the daughters of Buffy?' The article argued that there were no female friendships on view these days, and my immediate reaction was that strength, as we are encouraged to admire it, comes only in the masculine model, which is that of the lone ranger. So strong women inevitably become women who act alone. But reading this made me think about a different, older model, which suggests only one girl may triumph by finding the 'right' answers to the cultural challenges. Hmmm, haven't got any further with my thinking than this, but it's all a very intriguing conundrum.

Goodness, I don't know either, litlove (I only work part-time!), in fact I don't know how such people manage to function at all, they are all marvellous. And it does take me HOURS to put together a short post, although not quite as long as when I started here.

You always have something kind and something perceptive to write in your comments... I'm slightly horrified that Buffy might be old enough to have daughters (!), and I can't say much about what's on television since I don't really watch it (I know that looks pompous, but I don't), but if what that article claims is true, it's depressing. I agree that strength tends to be seen in terms of masculinity, and I have the feeling, which I can't properly justify, that while sometimes girls are given role models of strong, kick-ass, 'masculine' heroines in fiction or film, these roles aren't supported by the general culture and so they're just there to kind of soak up girls' fantasies, after which they're supposed to go back to normal life. Which does at least give girls more options than the sisters in this story, even if they're not encouraged to be 'too' strong.

Maybe there never was a sisterhood? Certainly the young women in the Grimms' fairy tales seem often to be in competition with each other - for parental affection, for a husband. Anyway, I agree with you about one girl having the 'right' answers, and sometimes they seem to be as a result of her kindness, and sometimes as a result of her cunning.

I've always thought having gold coins drop from one's mouth sounds as uncomfortable as the toads, and must have made life very uncomfortable! Perhaps what we need is a Carol Duffy 'World's Wife' style interpretation of the Grimm Tales...

I agree, Christine! Uncomfortable, and inconvenient too. I love the idea of a World's Wife sort of interpretation of the Grimms. I was just thinking that this story is one of the less famous tales, and wondering why some are more famous than others. Perhaps it contains too many elements which are common to other stories, and too few to really identify it (gingerbread house, hundred-year sleep, etc.)?